Treatment+of+Mentally+Ill

//__History of Mental Mistreatment__//
Mental mistreatment started around and possibly before the early 1800's during the Victorian era in England. Not much research was done on mentally ill patients so the doctors assumed that it was the work of witches or the devil. One common phrase used to describe mentally ill patients was that they had a "disease of the soul". Patients were often imprisoned, and given no food or clothing and often slept in the dirt.

It wasn't until the late 1800's that research was finally done on mental patients. It was then discovered that patients had a mental disease, not that they were created ill by god or witches. Conditions drastically improved. Patients were given adequate food and clothing, were allowed to sleep in beds, and weren't kept in restraints. Doctors actually started to try and treat patients instead of just leaving them alone. Some of the treatments were questionable though. One form of treatment was the “rotary chair”. A patient was strapped into a seat that rotated around a pole in the room, and was spun at very high speeds until the doctor deemed it ok to stop. The theory behind the treatment was that all of the fear, discomfort, and pressure in the brain caused by the chair would cause the patient’s brain and “equilibrium” to be reset.

Not only were the treatments for mental illness very strange, and almost always unproven to work, the qualifications for a person to be mentally ill were also very skewed. There was back then, of course, the normal definition of a person who was universally classified as mentally ill, who doesn’t function properly in society, or thinks very strange things that people normally think is scary or weird. However there is also the old, broad definition of what being mentally ill is. For women, for instance, if they were a lesbian, they were considered a threat to society.

//__Modern Mental Mistreatment__//
Now, instead of having a lack of knowledge of how to treat patients, we have a lack of will to treat them. Approxopately 77 new mental diorders appeared bewteen the years of 1987 and 1994, which leads many people to beleive that these aren't real disorders, but either just some kind of discomfort, or not even anything at all, but just how a certain person or group of people act. Also, the people who make these new diseases might be getting money from the drugs that are perscribed for them.

Many cases of mental mistreatment occur in hospitals that are under-funded or over-staffed. These funds are supposed to come from the state governments. Many of these cases are occurring in southern states such as Florida and Georgia where hospitals don't have enough funds to buy medicines and hire psichiatric doctors. Links to articles: =[|Court Documents Regarding the Mistreatment of Mentally Ill Prisoners]=